The Descendance of Morcs

I've realised I do enjoy trying to find things that make me physically unique. I think it must be the same urge that drives those who believe in astrology try to spot personal traits confirming their star sign. (Incidentally I was amused by Stephen Fry ordering "If anyone here believes in astrology, you're banned!" on this week's QI).

For Christmas this year I got a copy of "A Short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright (my dad's obviously noticed my recent interest in the natural sciences). I'm currently on my second read-through, and will probably write another post about it at a later time.

I missed it on the first read because embarrassingly I assumed the "nape" of the neck was at the front, but this time I noticed the following quote which is in the context of considering whether we evolved purely from Cro-Magnons, or whether some of us have Neanderthal blood ties too.

I also have personal evidence that Neanderthal genes may still be with us. A few modern people have telltale ridges on their heads. I happen to have one - a bony shelf across the back of the skull that looks and feels like the Neanderthal Bun. So until new findings come along to settle the matter, I choose to believe that Neanderthal blood still flows, however faint, in the Cro-Magnon tide.

Wright is referring here to the Occipital Bun. This was very interesting to me as I've always wondered whether the lump at the back of my head was normal (but always forgot before I had chance to compare with anyone else!) I'm not sure if it's actually big enough to be a real Neanderthal Bun, but it does look (well, feel) like the picture here.

Someone suggested that would explain why I have "Mr Tickle" arms too.

Clean Up

In case anyone notices, I've deleted all of the posts from the America trip, as it's now better documented on my Facebook profile.

In other news: watch this space for the morcs.com podcast!

It's Business Time

When I started making music, I had a very limited tool set which I knew my way around well. I tried to read up on music production in magazines like Future Music and Sound on Sound but no one seemed to be making music using just computers. They had all this outboard gear costing serious money. I thought I could do all of that inside my PC. Why weren't they? I couldn't make sense of what they were talking about.

I was annoyed that my stuff didn't sound professional next to a commercial CD when played back on the same system. My bass lines sounded weak, everything sounded weak, but I figured I just needed to experiment and learn more with the equipment I had. After all, with a wavetable sound card you can sample any sound imaginable and use it. What more do you need?

Then software like Reason came along. This brought all these mystical bits of hardware I'd not been able to understand into the PC. I could mess around with them and find out what they did. It was a revelation, I realised I'd been doing things the hard way, I could now make the sounds I'd wanted to make. It also opened my eyes to why my stuff sounded amateur, it was all about mastering: compression, EQ and so on. I didn't know how to fix it, but at least I knew what I was doing wrong.

There was so much possibility, so many ideas to work on that I couldn't sit down and finish a song. I'd make a loop and listen to it until I got bored of hearing it, then think of something else to try. I'd made loads of little loops but just couldn't seem to stick with it long enough to lay a track down. I couldn't go back to the old set up though. Ignorance was bliss, but I'd chosen the red pill.

More recently I've become interested in music theory. I didn't like the idea of it before. I do enough mathematical/theoretical stuff in my career in computers, but for some reason I decided to take a look at it. I discovered that I already knew some music theory, and had been applying it to what I did for years, but I hadn't known what to call it and there was a lot more to learn! I bought a guitar which meant I could sit in front of the TV playing along to film soundtracks and CDs, learning how to apply this theory.

This has brought me back to trying to write music again. I've upgraded to the latest version of Reason, discovered Ableton which amongst other things is a great tool for progressing loops into tracks, and I've almost got the PC hooked up how I want it.

Now that for the first time in a decade I feel like I can really get into trying to write some tunes, it's about time I got myself a website...